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eldavojohn writes "Just like the many stories surrounding alleged 'Wi-Fi sickness,' research is now showing that windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth instead of applying universally to windfarms. Areas that had never had any noise or health complaints were suddenly experiencing them after 2009 when anti-wind groups targeted populations surrounding windfarms. From the article, 'Eighteen reviews of the research literature on wind turbines and health published since 2003 had all reached the broad conclusion that there was very little evidence they were directly harmful to health.' While there's unfortunately no way to prove that someone is lying about how they feel, it's likely a mixture of confirmation bias, psychosomatic response, hypochondria, greed and hatred of seeing windmills on the horizon that drives this phenomenon."

That's not really substantiated. People used to think you could get sick from drinking from the same water fountain as a person with different skin color. Segregation wasn't just something they did without imagined moronic reason. If anything, this kinda stuff is tame compared to the levels of human stupidity we've achieved in the past.

Not true. By every measure we have, including tests specifically designed to measure basic intelligence and not education, people are getting smarter. This is called the Flynn Effect [wikipedia.org]. The improvement has been significant and consistent across a broad range of metrics. Scores on IQ tests, SAT tests, standardized academic tests, military qualification tests, have all shown marked increases over the last century, and are continuing to improve. Standardized aptitude tests were given to American soldiers during WWI, and the average score would be considered borderline retarded by today's standard. The reasons for the increase in intelligence is debatable, but is probably a combination of better nutrition, better prenatal medical care, less lead exposure, and more stimulating environments.

The Flynn effect is an observed reality. There is no hypothesis behind it, it simply is. There are numerous hypothesized explanations for it, not all of which would be significantly different in rural areas.

Did you notice the section in the article that you linked there, titled "Possible End of Progression"? There's evidence that the increase ended in the mid-1990's (likely from an effective plateau in the factors you mention), and then started to go in the other direction in the last decade.

People aren't getting any wiser, and propagandists are getting smarter too. While Fox News pushes *extremely dumb* ideas, it does so in a very slickly manipulative way that precisely targets the vulnerabilities of their demographic audience, effectively conditioning them to act less intelligent than they could be.

People aren't getting any wiser, and propagandists are getting smarter too. While Fox News pushes *extremely dumb* ideas, it does so in a very slickly manipulative way that precisely targets the vulnerabilities of their demographic audience, effectively conditioning them to act less intelligent than they could be.

Other mass media companies do the same thing, as do advertizing and public relations businesses. They get paid for that.

Yep; I didn't mean to imply that Fox is alone in doing this. You can find equally insidious propaganda from corporate think-tank shills brought on as NPR commentators --- just wrapped in more pseudo-intellectual clothing to target a different audience than Fox's proudly anti-intellectual angry white male demographic. In all cases, the big money advertizing interests can more than keep up with any raw intelligence gains in the general population (from better nutrition, health, and childhood education).

If this is not some half-hearted attempt at a joke, fox news came about in a time when the only sources of news were newspapers and evening news on TV. Really technically advanced people could dig into news on the usenet and the beginning of the web, and people who were really interested in world affairs would subscribe to physical periodicals about an in depth subject.

24 hour news as a service started for real in the late 90s. CNN existed since 1980, but the content they delivered was not substantially different from the evening news until that time. The 2000 election marked the first time constant infotainment managed substantial ratings, and things took off. They launched the idea of the pundit train during prime time, and made a ton of money that way.

If anything, Fox News is an artifact of people consuming more information faster than ever. People who previously were quite disconnected from news and world events.

Other things happened roughly same time - news, originally required by FCC as a public service as condition for license, became 'profit center' with relaxing of regs. Since by 1977 fewer than 50% of Americans read books, networks increasingly chased viewers (ratings) by flash-and-trash, bleeds-it-leads. (They saw no need to vie for eyeballs of literate people since they didn't really count for much anymore.)

I'd be surprised if they were either notably smarter or notably dumber individually(Probably a few points of extra credit for nutrient abundance, a few demerits for all the mercury we've liberated since the industrial revolution); but as a system the effect might be a lot more dramatic.

If you live in some teeny tribal kin-group, the 'believe whatever crazy shit the people around you believe, especially if they told you about it when you were a dumb kid and they were a responsible adult' heuristic is probably a pretty good one, unless you've been provided with demigod-level intelligence and unlimited time to experiment.

In a modern, mass-media saturated environment, where you are being fed a steady stream of what feels just like social input; but is produced by people who have nothing in common with you or your situation, nor occupy the same boat as you, it's hard not to be pessimistic about the possibilities.

If you talk only to your neighbors, feeling more or less safe based on how often crime is mentioned probably works out OK. If you sit down and tune in to the 24/7 National Sensationalist Violence Channel, you are still applying the same heuristic; but to every photogenic crime in a population north of 200million. That's going to work real well...

I know I am going to get a bunch of people who tell me, "Idiocracy is not real dude.".But...If you continue to make life simple for the stupid they will in fact breed more. Being stupid is no longer a death sentence nor does it seem to hinder reproduction in the current society.So we are in fact getting stupider.

I know I am going to get a bunch of people who tell me, "Idiocracy is not real dude.".
But...
If you continue to make life simple for the stupid they will in fact breed more. Being stupid is no longer a death sentence nor does it seem to hinder reproduction in the current society.
So we are in fact getting stupider.

It's not real. First of all, you're assuming that intelligence correlates necessarily with genetics, i.e. that a stupid person cannot have smart children. Thats false. Obviously, genetics plays some role, but upbringing and other factors play a strong role as well, and even with the genetic influence a stupid person can carry "smart" genes. Secondly, the "stupid" people have always bred more than the smarter ones. Quite often, the "smart" people are too busy studying things to have sex (for example, Tesla c

Back in the late 1970's (showing my fossilage here) Sixty Minutes (I sat about 20 feet from Ed Bradley) and other news orgs came to Midland, Michigan, after a Jack Anderson Confidential claimed Midland was awash with Carcinogenic Dioxins, spewed into the air and dumped into the Tittabawasee River by Dow Chemical.

People suddenly queued up to claim they were suffering many ills as brought on by these dioxins. The nation's media swarmed to the small midwestern city prepared for the worst (and to tell it all in gory detail.) Midland was alleged to have people with open sores and massive turmors lurching down the streets like some Dawn of the Dead scene. The reality was the concentrations of these compounds were in like 5 ppb (parts per billion), when checked on by DNR and others. Put into perspective it was like a football field, a mile high and one marble sitting in the end zone. Pretty mild and not the Love Canal the media were looking for. Within days it was all gone, nothing mentioned on Sixty Minutes or any other national news.

It's still on an ongoing issue in those parts. Driving through Saginaw/Midland area a few years ago lots of residents had signs in their front yards demanding Dow cleanup their Dioxin mess, especially houses near the Tittabawasee river. Weather or not it's really an issue? I have no idea. But people are still seem to be concerned about it.

The reality was the concentrations of these compounds were in like 5 ppb (parts per billion), when checked on by DNR and others. Put into perspective it was like a football field, a mile high and one marble sitting in the end zone. Pretty mild

5PPB is "mild"?!

You're talking about compounds with an LD50 in the micrograms/kilogram.

Safe exposure is 4 picograms/kilogram/day

5 ppb in your drinking water would get you about 18 micrograms/day, or 60,000-ish times that.

The reality was the concentrations of these compounds were in like 5 ppb (parts per billion), when checked on by DNR and others. Put into perspective it was like a football field, a mile high and one marble sitting in the end zone. Pretty mild

5PPB is "mild"?!

You're talking about compounds with an LD50 in the micrograms/kilogram.

Safe exposure is 4 picograms/kilogram/day

5 ppb in your drinking water would get you about 18 micrograms/day, or 60,000-ish times that.

Do keep in mind there are hundreds of compounds catagorized as "Dioxins" Very few of these are actually known toxins or carcenogens.

I asked my father about what was going on in the news and he directed me to the obituary page in the local paper. "What do you see there?" "A lot of people dead in their 70s, 80s and 90s with the rare centenarian." "Not a lot of people dying in their teens, 20s, 30s, which you would see if there were rampant cancer brought on by these compounds." It was a vivid lesson in viewing readily available empirical data.

That's an unfair dismissal of a serious issue. The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many

Some possible solutions: Stop the wind turbines from spinning (or just slow them down) when the bats are most likely to be flying by it (usually at sunset/sunrise). Or not building turbines in locations that are heavily traveled by bats. There are other solutions being researched, such as emitting sounds that mimic the bats' own echo-location signals.

The problem is both bats running into the fins and that the bats' lungs cannot handle the pressure gradient produced by the moving blades. see http://spectrum. [ieee.org]

The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many thousands of mosquitoes in a night.

In countries with more wind farms the damage is magnified. See Costa Rica. If only more people even gave a shit.

Do you have actual data to back up how many bats are being killing by wind gennies? I recalled people opposed to wind gennies saying they killed a lot of birds. However studies have shown cats kill more birds than wind generators [motherjones.com]. The article Do wind turbines kill birds? [howstuffworks.com] has a chart of statistics showing how many birds are killed by different things, from cars, wild and feral cats (but not pet cats?), to windows. Some may have a problem with the chart though, out of seven killers of birds 5 of the statistic

You're just a shill for big wind. This is a legitimate controversy and anyone who disagrees with me is being paid to do so. Science has been wrong before. These people are putting profit ahead of my health! I'm not opposing science, I'm just opposing corporate greed. Mankind is toying with forces it doesn't fully understand! Have there ever been any long term studies proving that windfarms don't cause sickness?

It's usually the foodies who go for esoteric salts, and they do so precisely for the impurities, some of which have interesting flavors.

Also, for whatever reason, manufacturers tend to sell differently shaped salt crystals depending on what the salt is being sold as. If you want larger granules(food grade, not the stuff sold for your driveway) or flake, you often end up with something labelled 'sea salt', even though refined mined salt could be produced in those shapes, rather than in the little teeny cubes

Come on. Deglaze the pan with a nice wine. The Maillard reaction adds complexity to the burny little brown bits, and so does the fermentation of the grapes. A1, Heinz 57, or ketchup are abominations, I agree. But a quick pan sauce tastes great, and can be really good on your side dishes too.

Went to Peter Luger in New York a few years ago with my brother. He made the mistake of ordering his steak well done. The waiter delayed his order by almost an hour, and then sneered as he put it on the table, stating that the chef had to mentally prepare himself to spoil a perfectly good piece of meat.

They release more radiation than nuclear plants that haven't had an accident. Unfortunately, nuclear accidents have released [slashdot.org] orders of magnitude more radiation than the entire history of operating coal plants.

Note: I'm actually very pro-nuclear, but I think this is a fact that needs to be discussed. The coal plant radiation myth is unfounded and makes pro-nuclear people look stupid when they use it. The danger from coal plants is the stuff that doesn't have a half-life, like mercury, arsenic, and soot. The uranium they release is mostly harmless.

Only if you include non-US nuclear power plants. Because Japan and Russia are the two big sinners, mainly because they have made bad choices when it comes to nuclear safety.

Honestly, the new molten salt reactors are safer than any anything we have thought of. When everyone panics and runs away, leaving the machines alone, they automatically and safely shut down. No fear of radiation leaks, just safely.

Fukushima's problem was caused by flooding in the basement where diesel generators were.

Not according to Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear technologist who operates the site energyfromthorium.com [energyfromthorium.com] who for Forbes wrote the article Explainer: What Caused The Incident At Fukushima-Daiichi [forbes.com]. At first he writes "The tsunami destroyed the diesel generators that provide power to drive the pumps that circulate the water coolant through the reactor that removes decay heat." But a bit later he writes generators ran "until their day tanks emptied" of diesel fuel. If emergency generators were running then they could have been refueled. The hard part would of been finding the people who were willing to put their lives at risk. However anyone who supports nuclear power should be so willing, if they aren't willing to put their own lives at risk why do they support putting other people's lives at risk?

All of the mentioned things could potentially cause enough problems in nuclear plants, but they would need to huge (like >7.75 magnitude earthquake *directly* under the reactor)

people should be smart enough to shutdown the reactor & do other preparations in time as hurricanes can be detected way earlier than tsunamis/earthquakes.

And what of tornadoes? They aren't as predicable as hurricanes. And at specific points they strike they are more powerful than hurricanes.

The biggest reason I oppose nuclear power though is because nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies [cato.org]
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don’t. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

If all energy subsidies were dropped, including for fossil fuels and nuclear power then geothermal, solar, wind, and other clean(er) energy sources would be more cost competitive. Coal get tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Without government loan guaranties Wall Street would not finance nuclear power. And if fossil fuels had to pay all of it's costs, instead of passing on external cost to others, their cost would be higher.

IIRC coal plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants do

This is something that is often said, but it is questionable if it is really true. When I have tried to find the sources, they all point to a single study [sciencemag.org] done in 1978 by a scientist at Oak Ridge National Labratory [wikipedia.org]. There are several problems with this claim:

1. It only looked at radiation released during "normal" operation. It didn't consider accidents at nuclear plants, which in reality account for nearly all the radiation they have released.2. Coal plants today release far less fly ash than they did in 1978.3. This study was done by ORNL, which has a vested interest in pushing nukes.

Disclaimer: I am pro-nuke, pro-windmill, and anti-coal, but I am also pro-truth, and this "factoid" about radioactive coal needs to die. There are plenty of real reasons to oppose burning coal.

Accidents at coal plants don't release significant radiation. When a billion gallons of coal ash slurry are heading toward your house, radiation will be the least of your concerns.

Besides, the original study assumed that all radiation is equal. But most radiation in coal is from thorium, which has no biological role [wikipedia.org], and does not bio-accumulate, unlike the radioactive iodine, cesium, potassium and strontium released in nuke accidents. Furthermore, thorium emits primarily alpha radiation, which is harmless when outside the body. Thorium does emit radon, but that is only a danger in unventilated enclosed spaces. So you should not make your house out of coal ash, but otherwise the radiation from it is basically harmless.

They do, but only because nuclear plants release essentially zero. While this is a good argument in favor of nuclear power, it's not exactly a resounding blow to coal, either.

That said: people don't seem to care about the (very strong) arguments against coal power regarding climate change and the environmental damage on both the mining and burning ends. Once upon a time I was idealistic and believed in rhetorical rigor, and would have criticized saying "Coal is a radiation hazard! RUN AWAY!" to the voters.

I suggest someone spread around the idea that coal power plants endager the health those nearby. A bonus is that this might actually be true.

Before scrubbers and such, one of the deadly elements thrown into the air from burning coal was Mercury.

But that's nothing. Really.

You've no doubt seen how hazardous Asbestos is to the lungs. People were tearing apart buildings, because floor tiling, ventillation and insulation was loaded with it. BUT... Never mind that, all cars were whizzing around for decades with Asbestos brake linings, filling cities with the fine dust of from these as motorists slowed down or stopped here and there by the tens of millions.

Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies [cato.org].
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don’t. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."

Oh, about [cato.org] CATO:
"The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. Its scholars and an

Nuclear power can't stand alone, at least with current reactor designs, because their output can't be ramped up or down very quickly. Many areas of North America (California is an example I know best) exhibit extreme daytime load peaks, followed by deep night-time lulls, due to the air conditioning load.

Years ago, during the California power crisis, BC Hydro made a killing due to this effect. During the daytime, they would run their hydro-electric plants flat out, at completely unsustainable levels, and sell the power to California utilities at almost usurious rates. At night, they would shut the hydro plants down, allow the water to pool up again behind the dam, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California.

The real point is that while Nuclear can work for the baseline load on the grid, current designs simply aren't nimble enough to meet the peaks and valleys they would face in normal day to day operation. They need to be complimented with some other power source that is more nimble.

Years ago, during the California power crisis, BC Hydro made a killing

An important note: the power crisis was caused entirely by market manipulation with Enron at the front of the line. There was never a shortage of capacity. Traders would call up power plants and convince them to shut down unnecessarily thus driving up demand and price. Surprisingly a few people at the top actually went to jail for it. Good times. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#Involvement_of_Enron [wikipedia.org]

OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they? Enron and the crisis they caused and profited from were a result of deregulation. Flat out. The "changes" that were made to the regulations? They were made to encourage a free market and competition. But there's no competition if there aren't any players with any power. And BOY OH BOY did those fuckers abuse what little power they were given.

Owning both electrical generation and the distribution of that electricity was made illegal.

Yes, they split power generation and power distribution. That's one part of it. It made for a system of competition so that there were no longer territories of my generators and my neighbors generators. It set up a system where the old boys kept control of the distribution, and the new kids were given the generation, both were given a doggy biscuit and some ground rules for playing nice, and then set upon each other.

That "capped retail price"? Think about that for a moment. The entire point of this deregulation thing is to lower the price of electricity to the users. Alright, that's the goal. That's the entire point. That's why they did this. They believed the free market would work it's magic and they'd see lower prices than in the old regulated system. If they can't do that, if the system on the whole doesn't produce prices below a certain point, GUESS WHAT? It turns out that deregulation doesn't work. The cap let the pain of a broken system land in corporate-ville rather than raping the customers. At least, you know, the excessive pain.

Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.

The entire crisis was caused by the state government.

Yes, it was caused by the state government DEREGULATING the power industry and giving more control to corporate entities. It was a pretty bad move that they shouldn't have done. Some things you can't trust in the hands of businessmen. Like those things with natural monopolies. Like utilities. Congratulations, you found where the government made it's fault.

And your complaint is that a post from someone who works in the wind farm business remarked that the low-frequency throbbing from giant turbines is problematic for people getting their guts and sinus cavities pulsated all day, every day might just be a health issue? You're grousing that that got modded up as interesting?

Having a beautiful, natural view obscured by ugly windmills couldn't possibly cause stress and induce real physical sickness in folks, now could it?!If you travel much, you'll notice that folks tend to be happier in areas with beautiful scenery, much less so elsewhere.

Another thing, most people tend to be very mild mannered. Quite a large number of people will accept a burnt pizza with a smile, only a small minoroty will complain. Perhaps these people were bothered all along and just didn't say anything to

Having a beautiful, natural view obscured by ugly windmills couldn't possibly cause stress and induce real physical sickness in folks, now could it?!

Maybe it could. If it did you'd expect studying the incidence of the supposed symptoms that it causes would show that they had a correlation with the presence of windfarms independent of propaganda campaigns targeting the local area and attempting to convince people that windfarms are bad for health.

Science was created so that we didn't have to answer question be anecdote and supposition.

Or you could argue that the populace was experiencing negative symptoms from the windmills being nearby, but up until they were made aware that they could cause negative health effects, they attributed the decline to other things. The effect of the information, then, served to give them a list of symptoms that they could validate against, and come to their own conclusions.

Or you could argue that the populace was experiencing negative symptoms from the windmills being nearby, but up until they were made aware that they could cause negative health effects, they attributed the decline to other things. The effect of the information, then, served to give them a list of symptoms that they could validate against, and come to their own conclusions.

Holy hell, you just told us that if someone makes something up, it's as good as real.

Lightknight, I just got a rash, and the person sitting beside me said htey think it's your posting. I think they might be right, so We are joining a class action suit against you because we didn't know it before, but a lot of people have been getting heartburn, hangnails, athlete's foot and jock itch. We now know who to blame it on. You need to stop posting messages so that our healt will return to normal.

Holy hell, you just told us that if someone makes something up, it's as good as real.

No, he just told us that it's possible for someone who's experiencing something to only later come to realize what's causing it. Like thinking you have a cat allergy, when it turns out you have a ragweed allergy. Or thinking you've got gut or sinus issues when it turns out living under the shadow of giant spinning 747 wings might actually be troublesome, and explain what some people experience. It's certainly easy enough to do a blind test. Just like proving that complaints about "WiFi" allergies are nonsense by doing a blind test where the supposed victim can't guess if the local transceiver is on or off, prevent the person living next to a giant wind farm from being able to see if the blades are being allowed to spin, and see if there's a difference one way or the other. Of course, since you can hear them wooshing around 24x7, that might be a harder test to do, blindly.

That methodology leaves you with a correlation vs causation problem. Did the local campaigns trigger the "symptoms", or did they cause people to make a legitimate association between real symptoms and a wind farm, something they had not considered before (like one of the parent posts suggested)? An even bigger problem is this: would your own survey have the same type of influence on the results as the anti-wind farm campaign? Without a way to control for that, you can't, strictly speaking, assign a cause.

No, it doesn't. More precisely, you end up with a potential correlation vs. causation problem if you accept the hypothesis that windfarms caused symptoms based on it, once you have evidence of the correlation in the first place. But you don't have a correlation vs. causation problem if you reject the hypothesis when you fail to find the correlation suggested.

Did the local campaigns trigger the "symptoms", or did they cause people to make a

Can actually make you sick. Fear, paranoia, stress can all affect the mind to think there's something wrong with the body, until it manifests. That's why attitude is such an important part of recovering from sickness... if you think you're not going to get better, you may not, but it's guaranteed that it will take longer for you to get better as a consequence.

Then again I'd sooner listen a politician than an anti-windmill activist, you've gotta be f'in stupid to think windfarms are bad for your health.

The psychosomatic consequences of windpower are nothing that should stop anybody from building windfarms. But when people in Japan, who have barely been exposed to any significant radiation at all, start complaining about imaginary symptoms of their exposure to radiation (as well as very real symptoms of unchecked overdosing on iodine) this is just yet another reason to do away with nuclear power.

I can't find a reference to it at the moment, but a community was opposed to cell towers due to radiation. This caused much problems for anyone trying to build infrastructure in the area. One provider put up some towers and the residents complained that the towers radiation made them ill and the improvement on reception was only marginal.

In a review with the community leaders, they invited them to tour the facilities while they measured the field strength. The tour revealied that there was no equipment installed. The towers were installed early to measure the baseline illness so when the equipment was installed, that illness that was attribuitable to the radiation can be measured.

This is just another example of the placebo (or I guess the "nocebo") effect. If you tell people something will make them fell bad, particularly if they are inclined to dislike the thing in question (for whatever reason), they will almost magically start to feel bad. You can do this for fun and excitement at parties: Tell people you have an upset stomach from the salad (or soup or chicken or whatever). You'll pretty quickly find one other person who tells you they don't feel well either. And now there are t

So in an Village the T-Mobile sets up a tower. Suddenly people started complaining and pointed at the tower for the reason. The Telekom guys were baffled, imagining what would happen if they actually powered it up.

Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..

Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..

Okay so let's say that from right up in front of the thing you experience 105 dB [gereports.com] of sound. Now let's use some basic math to compute [sengpielaudio.com] what 105 dB at 0.5 meters away sounds like when you're 2,000 meters away. 32.958 dB should be the intense ear splitting result at the balcony. Does your neighbor have some super noisy form of wind turbine or does your aunt go insane inside a kitchen when the refrigerator is running? Does she have to turn her air conditioning and refrigerator off in order to sleep? Because according to every resource out there [windmeasur...tional.com], physics put that noise at sub 40 dB. Even if we bump it up to rock concert levels (120 dB) it should be 48 dB at 2 km and that's about as loud as an AC unit.

Now, how loud is acceptable at the edge of someone's property before you think the authorities should be involved? And think carefully about people who like to use air condition/compressors, mow their lawns, have yard parties with music, drive motorcycles and do any good patriotic non-save-the-rainforest stuff before you answer.

We already know that the K-weighting of ITU-BS.1770 [bnoack.com] is a much better indicator of perceived loudness than A-weighting, and K-weighting weighs lower frequencies much higher than A-weighting.

Moreover, it is possible that the optimal frequency weighting for "annoyance" is something completely different. To date, no one has really compiled the data for that.

In Ontario, the right-wing establishment have successfully united the usual anti-government, anti-progress suspects with some pissed-off farmers, rural retirees, and rich NIMBYs to create a particularly nasty strain of anti-windmill sentiment. They've become the Typhoid Mary of wind farm sickness.

It's true that the Ont. government was a bit overzealous in a few of its land acquisition, and there were a small number of households which were closer than what is considered a comfortable distance from some installations, but as far as i know, every such household has either been paid off or relocated.

The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...

Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.

Finally, the technology is still pretty young. There's every reason to expect that wind generators will become more reliable, efficient, quieter, and that their energy can be stored and used more effectively. How many centuries has coal-burning taken to get efficient and clean up a bit?

The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...

The differences between the noises you cite and wind farms are as follows;Consistency; The noise from a wind far is there usually 24/7 at a fairly constant rate. All the examples you cite are intermittent. There are periods if quiet between when trains and aircraft go by. When building roadways millions are spent on berms and sound fences to mitigate the noise. Even then there are periods of time, usually at night when people are trying to sleep, that roadways are much quieter.Frequencies; This is a major

Part of the morning ritual for this facility is to have staff inspect the ground surrounding the facility for any abnormality including bird strikes. In five years of operations they have never detected a single bird strike nor found any dead birds near the windmill. Even my house had had more bird strikes than that.

Anecdotal video's are not science. Go count the number of birds killed by cars, cats or even running into windows or buildings. Windmills aren't even in the top 20.

And that's the point, the big windmills kill just about as many birds as buildings in the same area. So unless you are going to suggest banning the construction of anything taller than about 6 inches you need just accept the fact that windmills aren't killing birds at any higher rate than any other stationary object.

Actually windfarms do that a little. There must be some measurable effect as the turbines extract energy from the wind, rendering it to lower energy. SO the way to stop wind is to build more windfarms.